Click Tracking

Why should I use Click Tracking?

Link counts tell you where links are. Click Tracking tells you which ones are used. Click data shows which internal links guide visitors to more content, which affiliate links produce traffic, and which automatic links are worth keeping.

Many link tracking plugins send visitors through a redirect URL on your domain to count clicks. Link Manager does not, and your links point directly to their destination. Analytics tools can track link clicks too, but they need extra configuration and their reports live outside WordPress. Click Tracking records each click inside WordPress, next to the rest of your link data.

Clicks on every type of link

Once enabled, Click Tracking records clicks on the links of your posts, to pages of your site or to other websites. Each click is labeled as internal or external depending on whether the target URL belongs to your site.

No redirects and no cloaked URLs

The click is sent in the background while the visitor follows the link. The URL of your links is never changed, so the destination URL that visitors, search engines, and affiliate programs see is the real one.

Detailed click log

The Clicks menu lists every recorded click with its ID, the post where the link was clicked, the date and time, the target URL, the type, and the anchor text. You can filter by any column and sort the table, for example to see all the clicks on a single affiliate URL in the last month.

When a click comes from an automatic link, you can open the rule that generated it directly from the log. The Dashboard also shows the clicks on automatic links for each post.

Duplicate click protection and anonymized IP addresses

To avoid inflated numbers, repeated clicks from the same IP address within a few seconds are recorded only once. IP addresses are anonymized before they are stored, are used only for this check, and are never displayed in the plugin.

Export and cleanup

The Export button downloads the click log in CSV format. If necessary, old clicks can be deleted in bulk from a dedicated menu.

How to use Click Tracking

1. Open Link Manager > Settings > Advanced and enable Enable Click Tracking in the Click Tracking card.
2. Wait for your visitors to click the links in your posts.
3. Open Link Manager > Clicks to see the recorded clicks, and check the Clicks columns of the Dashboard to compare the clicks of each post.

Note that click tracking is disabled by default, and the tracking script is loaded only when it is enabled.